Cracked Bones Reveal Cannibalism by Doomed Arctic Explorers

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An ill-fated 19th-century expedition that became trapped in the
Canadian Arctic ended in a particularly gruesome type of
cannibalism, new research suggests.

The gory end was faced by the British navy on the Franklin
expedition,
the doomed 1845 voyage to discover a sea route through the
Canadian Arctic to the Orient.

Though scientists had long known that the shipmen likely resorted
to
cannibalism to survive, the new study reveals the true
extremes the crew went to. Not only did the starving explorers
cut flesh off the bones of their fallen comrades, they also
cracked open the bones to suck out the marrow.

On paper, the high-profile Arctic voyage looked like a plum gig.
The famous Sir John Franklin, who had helmed two other Arctic
explorations, led the team. The two ships, called the
HMS Erebus and the HMS Terror, were sturdy and well
provisioned, with between five and seven years of food stowed
onboard. In addition, other Arctic expeditions had gone off
without major problems.

"Being a polar explorer in the 19th century British Navy was a
surprisingly safe occupation. You'd expect a 1 percent mortality
rate," said study author Simon Mays, an archaeologist with
Historic England, an organization of the British government that
preserves historic buildings, monuments and sites.

The first year of the voyage, 1845, was a low ice year, and the
129-man expedition made it past
Baffin Bay, near Greenland, and then threaded its way between
islands in the Canadian Archipelago, looking for a Northwest
Passage. Once the ocean froze, the ships were stuck for the
winter, just off one of the islands, called King William Island.
(The crew anticipated being frozen in for a few winters, which
was why they had provisioned the ships so heavily, Mays said).

Unfortunately, the next few summers had heavy sea ice, so the
ships remained stuck. The last communication from the British
navy men was a terse note dated April 25, 1848, which revealed
that 24 men had already died before they left the ships.

Bafflingly, the crew abandoned their food-laden ships and decided
to trek 1,000 miles (1,609 kilometers) to the nearest Hudson's
Bay trading post, following the fish-rich Back River to safety.

Slow starvation

The plan was foolhardy: There were just a few Arctic birds in the
region, and the fishing was poor and required cutting through
thick ice. Even the Inuit stayed away from the area because food
was scarce, Mays said. [ In
Photos: Life in the Arctic Region of the Americas ]

"You aren't going to feed a group that size by knocking holes in
the ice," Mays told Live Science.

None of the crewmembers made it even a fifth of the way to the
outpost, and for years, no one knew what had happened. Then in
1854, a Canadian mapmaker heard Inuit reports of cannibalism.
Over the next 150 years, scientists found more and more remains
from the crew and the original ships, and scientists found cut
marks on many of the bones, suggesting that someone had cut flesh
from the bones.

In the new study, which was published online June 18 in the
Journal
of Osteoarchaeology, Mays and his colleague Owen Beattie, an
anthropologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, took a
second look at 35 bones from two areas: Booth Point and Erebus
Bay. The bones had signs of breakage and "pot polishing," which
occurs when the ends of bones heated in boiling water rub against
the cooking pot they are placed in. This typically occurs in the
end stage of cannibalism, when
starving people extract the marrow to eke out the last bit of
calories and nutrition they can.

Still, the new study doesn't shed light on the biggest mystery of
all: What made so many of the crew members die before abandoning
their ships, and why did they decide to make the decision to
leave?

One possibility is that the crew members were suffering from the
vitamin C deficiency called scurvy, or that
lead poisoning killed the first crew members and addled the
wits of the rest, Mays said. Follow-up studies on teeth samples
would need to confirm those theories, Mays said.

The new finds are consistent with Inuit eyewitnesses who
described piles of human bones that looked as if they were
fractured to extract the marrow, said Anne Keenleyside, a
bioarchaeologist at Trent University in Canada, who was not
involved in the study.

Though the notion of
cannibalism was shocking to the British populace who first
learned of the Franklin expedition's harrowing end, the new
finding "speaks to the very desperate situation in which those
men found themselves," Keenleyside told Live Science. "You have
to imagine yourself in that situation, what would you do?"